And so Joe McMoneagle put the deep feelings of sorrow and loss of his friend Hartleigh Trent in the same place he’d put similar feelings about friends he lost in Vietnam. One foot in front of the other. One remote viewing session after the next. He was the only one left to conduct operational sessions now, and his stress levels skyrocketed, he says. During this difficult time Fred Atwater came up with an idea, something to help him relax. “Fred suggested I accompany him to a place called the Monroe Institute,” McMoneagle recalls. It was a new age retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains run by a sixty-seven-year-old guru named Robert Monroe.
Monroe was a peculiar figure, someone who for the first half of his adult life lived a conservative existence as a radio executive and then, in his midforties, abruptly retired and immersed himself in consciousness studies and the supernatural. Monroe’s mentor in these pursuits was Andrija Puharich, who according to Monroe taught him how to alter his consciousness on demand. The result, Monroe said, was an out-of-body experience, or OBE.
The mystical idea of an out-of-body experience is rooted in religion and has many names. Hindu scripture describes yoganandas who perform astral projection. Ancient Egyptian texts refer to a second, nonphysical body, or subtle body, called ka. The Wai Wai people of Brazil called it soul flight. In The Secret of the Golden Flower, an eighth-century Chinese handbook on alchemy and meditation, out-of-body experiences are referred to as “travel to the celestial sphere.” Bob Monroe’s modern out-of-body experiences were of a much more plebeian kind. Monroe claimed to be able to leave his body and travel to very specific places here on Earth, including the kitchens and bedrooms of various friends and acquaintances. In his memoir, he wrote that Andrija Puharich was one of his early test targets.
Desiring to be “reportorial and objective,” Monroe kept a record of his experiences, he said. In a journal entry dated May 5, 1961, he wrote: “Applied mental lift-off, and concentrated mental desire to visit Dr. Puharich [in California]. After a short trip, stopped in room. There was a long narrow table, with several chairs and bookshelves. There was a man sitting at the table, writing on paper. He resembled Dr. Puharich. I greeted him and he looked up and smiled.” Later, Monroe checked in with Puharich. “The locale was right, and actions were correct, but he has no memory of the visit,” Monroe wrote. But the more Monroe practiced leaving his physical body the better he became at it, he said. Everyone has a “second body,” he wrote, one that can travel around at will. He planned to keep track of his OBEs and write a bestselling book.
It did not take long for Monroe’s out-of-body experiences to take a salacious turn. During one experience he desired to have sex with his wife, he wrote, but she was sound asleep next to him in their bed, he said, so he branched out with his “second body,” and began enjoying sex with numerous women on the astral plane. Monroe described each experience as “unbearable ecstasy,” but also “as ordinary as shaking hands.” When Monroe’s wife, Mary, found out, she made copies of her husband’s journal entries and gave them to Puharich, ostensibly for his opinion as a medical doctor. According to Monroe’s biographer, Ronald Russell, Mary never heard back from Puharich, who wrote about Monroe’s sexual escapades in his own book, Beyond Telepathy, published in 1962. In it, Puharich declared Monroe’s out-of-body experiences were a fraud. Monroe had a drug habit, he wrote, which involved sniffing model-airplane glue. Puharich surmised that Monroe was merely simulating out-of-body escapades while high on drugs (an ironic instance of the pot calling the kettle black). When Monroe read about himself in Beyond Telepathy he became furious and told his lawyer he wanted to sue Puharich for libel. The attorney advised against this, on the ground that a jury might instead question Monroe’s sanity. In the end, Monroe decided not to sue. “The woolly world of consciousness expansion does not necessarily include integrity, empathy or honesty,” Monroe said.
Bob Monroe published his own book in 1971, Journeys Out of the Body, in which he described his experiences on the astral plane. The book became a hit, selling more than 100,000 copies. Now Monroe had an audience to which he could market and sell a product he’d patented, an audiotape of binaural beats he’d trademarked as Hemi-Sync, short for hemispheric synchronization. The concept was more than a century old, built on the work of Heinrich W. Dove, a Prussian physicist who proposed the concept of the binaural beat in 1839. The idea was that when two pure tones of slightly different frequencies are played one in each ear, the brain perceives the difference between the two signals as a third, phantom sound. According to Monroe, listening to his tapes produced a state of mind conducive to astral projection. Hemi-Sync, he said, was a gateway to another level of consciousness—not awake, but also not asleep.
Across America, people wanted to have the same kinds of experiences Bob Monroe enjoyed, so he opened the Monroe Institute and became a celebrity in parapsychology circles. Monroe’s ideas were far-out and unorthodox. He promoted the idea that life after death was real, and that with enough Hemi-Sync training, clients would be able to visit with dead loved ones “on the other side.” This was all very new age, and it was accepted in certain circles, but the U.S. Army was historically not one of them. It would be safe to say that the average taxpayer would not condone this kind of training for soldiers. In the fall of 1982, however, in his capacity as branch chief, Skip Atwater thought the Monroe Institute would be a good place for Joe McMoneagle to learn how to relax. McMoneagle agreed and became the institute’s first official U.S. Army client. Soon hundreds of INSCOM personnel would follow.
A thirty-minute drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Monroe Institute sits on eight hundred acres surrounded by dense forest and rolling hills. In the winter of 1983 Fred Atwater accompanied Joe McMoneagle there with the goal of helping Remote Viewer 001, as he was designated, learn to relax deeply. After a weeklong seminar, McMoneagle returned home feeling different, he says. He slept a little better, felt less stressed, and seemed better able to focus. After a second trip to Monroe, McMoneagle recalls experiencing a shift. There was “a noticeable difference in my remote viewing,” he says.
Atwater suggested that McMoneagle write a report and request more time at the institute. Permission granted, he began a fourteen-week intensive course in pursuit of a new goal. With Bob Monroe, McMoneagle would develop a system to have and repeat the out-of-body experience. Things started to “really open up,” says McMoneagle. Atwater was pleased and encouraged him to write another review. This time, McMoneagle produced a very positive, ten-page classified report encouraging his commanding officers at INSCOM to allow other soldiers to learn how to expand their consciousness and have out-of-body experiences at the Monroe Institute.
“Intellectual horizons would be broadened and new concepts of perception would be unavoidable,” McMoneagle wrote. “Light and heavy emotion-packed responses will result from the intensive [Hemi-Sync] tape experience. This experience can be expected to alter the participant’s personality with regard to interpersonal relationships.” McMoneagle cautioned that Monroe’s program was not ideal for the average “military-minded [individual] unless participants across the board are willing and urged to divest themselves of peer pressure, rank consciousness, [and] ego-based self protectiveness,” he warned. “The experience is intended to expand man’s consciousness and broaden his perception of reality.” If a soldier couldn’t accept this, “the experience of the whole would be seriously diluted.”
In hindsight, this is where a red flag should have been raised. The Army was and remains, by its very nature, “military-minded.” Coupling Army doctrine with expanding consciousness and shifting perceptions of reality was a potentially catastrophic mix. But Fred Atwater was not the only officer at INSCOM working with Bob Monroe. So was Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander, director of General Bert Stubblebine’s Advanced Human Technology Office.
In the winter of 1983, in search of “human technologies” to enhance soldier performance and shrink the technology gap, the Arm
y Science Board hosted a retreat at the Monroe Institute to discuss “strategies and actions which improve human capability, potential and performance.” Bob Monroe was one of four speakers to address the attendees. In documents declassified by the CIA, Monroe told Army Science Board advisers that in the five years his institute had been in business he had personally conducted 4,823 experiments on 1,200 individuals. The results, he said, illustrated that “the electrical effect [of Hemi-Sync] stimulated the brain to induce certain changes [in the] biological sphere of influence,” including the ability to “cause sleep, cause wakefulness, increase concentration, increase recall of information, reduce stress, decrease pain, [and] increase speed of healing following surgery or injury.” Cognitive benefits included “enhanced reading skills, rapid vocabulary learning, improved decision making, improved problem solving and improved muscular control”—all the things General Stubblebine was looking for.
A second advisory team not affiliated with Stubblebine’s High Performance Task Group was sent to the institute to assess the results of the Hemi-Sync tape seminar. This group rejected Monroe’s claims. In findings presented to Pentagon officials on April 18, 1983, the team found that “Exposure to the sleep tape did not appear to aid sleep [and] wakefulness effects were not convincingly demonstrated.” As for enhanced cognition and medical claims, “concentration benefits were not convincingly demonstrated [and] medical claims and effects were not supported by scientifically acceptable studies, only testimonial type comments.”
The Defense Intelligence Agency asked Central Intelligence Agency to weigh in. The CIA assigned Kit Green the job. Green read the reports, examined the data, and made a general assessment. Altered states make the brain unstable, he said, and can have effects similar to hallucinogens. “Enhancing an altered state in pursuit of intelligence collection,” he wrote, would likely produce more noise and less signal. The CIA recommended to DIA that the Army disengage from its partnership with the Monroe Institute. General Stubblebine read the CIA’s recommendation. He disagreed and overruled it.
In an interview in 2016, Dr. Green stated that he believed what General Stubblebine was doing was dangerous. “And that is where I started diverting from Dale Graff and Hal Puthoff and others. I do not believe you can train a soldier to be a psychic spy,” Green insists. “I had conducted enough experiments with a few people [i.e., Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, and Pat Price] that it [was] clear to me that the phenomenology that had to do with remote viewing was, from time to time, one hundred percent accurate”—meaning that in certain people it was phenomenal in the literal sense of the word. “I felt that what I had found was that the people who were [almost] always right, and were doing the things that were the most dramatic—the Sugar Grove experiments, the experiments with Uri Geller, Pat Price’s experiments—those were not average human beings. They were much smarter than the average human being. I looked at their blood tests, their genetic tests… their IQ tests… their neurological tests and their cardiovascular tests, which has a lot to do with endocrinology. I concluded that these people are abnormal.” In Green’s assessment, that was an indicator of why they were so good at remote viewing.
Green recalls his confrontation with General Stubblebine over this issue. “I said, ‘You cannot take young soldiers and ask them if they want to be psychic spies and then train them in remote viewing.’” Green suggested what he believed was a wiser approach: “Take these physiological, psychological, psychiatric and genetic characteristics we identified [at CIA] and go recruit more people like that.” Stubblebine disagreed. He was convinced that ESP and PK and other forms of psychic functioning were latent in all people and could be brought out through training, and as commander of INSCOM he had the authority to overrule Kit Green. Green’s dissent, however, brought up the issue of research ethics and principles for human experimentation established by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (i.e., the Nuremberg Code), and INSCOM was now required to create a Human Use Review Board in order to continue its training.
For General Stubblebine, one hurdle remained. Monroe’s patented Hemi-Sync tapes were part of a Monroe Institute seminar called Gateway, and these seminars involved daily group discussions among participants. Army intelligence personnel could not mix with the civilian population in such an open-discussion environment. The Army would need its own program, an INSCOM version of Gateway, so Stubblebine arranged to have Robert Monroe’s stepdaughter, Nancy Honeycutt, redesign the Gateway seminar to meet Army intelligence needs. The new program was called RAPT, Rapid Acquisition Personnel Training.
At Fort Meade, word spread fast. There was a new training program being offered, one that could teach a soldier or an Army civilian how to expand their consciousness and have an out-of-body experience. Scores of Army intelligence workers signed up for RAPT. It did not take long for chaos to descend.
More trouble was brewing. In January 1983, the magician James Randi’s battle with Uri Geller over the issue of psychokinesis took an extraordinary turn, one that devastated the civilian parapsychology community. Since 1973, Uri Geller and James Randi had continued to appear on national talk shows, with Geller asserting that his ESP and PK powers were genuine and Randi insisting that Geller was a magician. Unable to put Geller out of business with rhetoric or to get the public to dismiss ESP and PK as fraud, Randi decided to up his game and perpetrate a hoax against a well-known parapsychology lab in St. Louis, Missouri.
Randi sent two young magicians pretending to be psychics to a privately funded institution called the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University. Steven Shaw and Michael Edwards told scientists there that they could use psychokinesis to bend spoons and move objects without touching them. In reality, they employed a form of prestidigitation, or sleight of hand, taught to them by James Randi.
Over a three-year period the two teenagers spent a total of five weeks in the Washington University lab. In the meantime, Randi sent twenty-two letters to lab director Peter R. Phillips warning Phillips that spoon bending could easily be faked by skilled magicians and offering ways to share methods the lab could employ to catch people who were cheating. Phillips never took Randi up on his offer. At one point, in 1982, the two magicians were dismissed from the lab on the grounds that they could not perform under certain controls but were rehired a few months later by a different set of researchers working for the same lab.
In January 1983, Randi held a press conference to announce that he had masterminded a hoax against the McDonnell Laboratory. When a reporter asked one of the young men, “Can you tell us how you do that?” Steven Shaw walked up to the microphone and said, “I cheat.” The room went wild, and the story generated much negative press against parapsychologists. The Washington Post called the event “the slyest scientific hoax in years.” Laboratory director Peter Phillips said he had trusted the research subjects and that “there are ethical issues involved” in lying to scientists. Randi retorted that this was exactly his point.
Ray Hyman, the psychologist hired by ARPA in 1973 to evaluate Uri Geller at SRI, weighed in. “Randi was very upset by Geller’s using trickery to deceive scientists. He thought it was very immoral. And he felt that it was a prostitution of his beloved magic.” Martin Gardner, the father of the skeptical scientific movement, also spoke out. “Paranormal metal-bending is so fantastic a violation of natural laws that the first task of any competent experimenter is to determine whether a psychic who bends spoons is cheating or not.” The Pentagon assigned an analyst to examine the hoax and see how it might affect its top-secret Grill Flame program.
“The magician James Randi claimed a lab was taken in by trickery and that most, if not all, parapsychology research is suspect,” the analyst noted, but insisted that Randi’s claims were “gross distortions” of the facts. The two magicians had been dismissed from the lab the year before, the Defense Department analyst wrote, “when it became clear they could not demonstrate psychic abilities under tighter controls or formal scientific experimentatio
n. It is clear Mr. Randi is solely interested in promoting his image as a clever magician and in enhancing his career as a showman at the expense of reporting accuracy. The use of tactics involving plants raises ethical questions as well.” As for any potential impact on Grill Flame, the analyst concluded that the bad publicity “should in fact have an overall beneficial effect on open parapsychological laboratories that are not as tight in experimental technique and subject selection as they could be,” which sounded a bit like wishful thinking. But the hoax did affect the INSCOM program, explained Colonel John Alexander in an interview in 2016.
“We started using magicians as consultants. Among the people I was involved with was Doug Henning,” Alexander says. In 1983 Henning was one of the most famous magicians in the world. The first episode of Doug Henning’s World of Magic, in 1975, still holds the record as the most-watched magic show in television history, with a reported audience of over fifty million. Another individual Alexander was working with at this time, also involving psychokinesis research, was Jack Houck, the Boeing aerospace engineer and progenitor of the PK spoon-bending party. “Jack would host spoon-bending parties at my house,” Alexander says. Doug Henning was invited to attend. Alexander wanted the magician’s expert opinion about whether some or all of a group of roughly twenty guests could collectively cheat at one of Houck’s PK parties.